‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Star Adore Delano Comes Out as Transgender

Adore Delano is proudly coming out.

On Wednesday night (July 26), the 33-year-old RuPaul’s Drag Race season six finalist and American Idol contestant, came out as transgender in an emotional video documenting her journey.

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“I wanted to let everybody know that I am transitioning, and I kept it really of hush-hush the first three months because I wanted to go through the beginning stages of the puberty privately,” Adore shared in a video posted on Instagram, in which she also opened up about being sober for the last two years. “I’ve found that it’s been very enlightening and has made me probably the happiest I’ve ever been in my adult life.”

Adore went on to recall her journey from “dysphoria to euphoria” and feeling like she born in the wrong body. She also talked about coming out as bisexual at age 12 before coming out as gay, and then revealing to her mom in high school that she was transgender.

“I came out to my mom as transgender,” Adore explained. “I didn’t know the words for that. I just told my mom ‘I’m not a boy, I’m a girl. I want to live my life as a girl.’ And I’m so blessed to have a mom, especially in the subculture that I grew up in, that was so understanding. She was so understanding with everything and she said, ‘Let’s figure it out and get you through school and know how to put ‘em up and fight when you need to.’”

However, when she auditioned for season seven of American Idol in 2008, she decided to “suppress everything.”

“I threw it away, I burned it. I reinvented myself into something that was so uncomfortable,” Adore recalled. “It was almost like a sacrifice in order to get what I wanted career-wise. It made sense to me at the time, as a 16-year-old, and then I got on the show, and that carried on in the story on Drag Race.”

After being eliminated from Idol, Adore went to living life in a “more femme-presenting” way and fell in love with the transformational power of drag.

“I’m living in my world now, and it feels so empowering, and it feels so good,” Adore said. “It feels so liberating.”

Adore went on to reveal that she’s going to be undergoing surgery in November, saying that she’s “probably going to look a little different,” before adding that she’ll be taking a few months off at the beginning of 2024 for “some major surgeries” as well.

“I am transgender,” Adore concluded. “I’m going by she/her. They still feels a little cute, but she/her just feels yummy on this cupcake.”